1024 WILLIAMJAMES
That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning, other than
practical, there is for us none. Ostwald in a published lecture gives this example of what
he means. Chemists have long wrangled over the inner constitution of certain bodies
called “tautomerous.” Their properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that
an instable hydrogen atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are instable mixtures of
two bodies. Controversy raged, but never was decided. “It would never have begun,”
says Ostwald, “if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental
fact could have been made different by one or the other view being correct. For it would
then have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel was
as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the raising of dough by yeast, one
party should have invoked a ‘brownie,’ while another insisted on an ‘elf’ as the true
cause of the phenomenon.”*
It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance
the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There
can beno difference anywhere that doesn’t makea difference elsewhere—no difference in
abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct con-
sequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The
whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make
to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula
be the true one.
There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept
at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume made momentous
contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are
only what they are “known as.” But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in frag-
ments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become
conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that
destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.
Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist
attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objec-
tionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and
once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns
away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priorirea-
sons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He
turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards
power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely
given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality,
and the pretence of finality in truth.
At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But
the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in
my last lecture the “temperament” of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type
would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultra-
montane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would
come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand.
*“Theorie und Praxis,”Zeitsch. Des Oesterreichischen Ingenieur u. Architecten-Vereines, 1905,
Nr. 4 u. 6. I find a still more radical pragmatism than Ostwald’s in an address by Professor W.S. Franklin:
“I think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student gets it, is that it is ‘the science of masses, mole-
cules, and the ether.’ And I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student does not wholly get it, is that
physics is the science of the ways of taking hold of bodies and pushing them!” (Science,January 2, 1903).